Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The world as we know it is ending

by David Atkins

Writing about climate change is exhausting. Not in the sense that it's so hard that you need a nap after writing about it, but in the sense that every post basically comes down to the same thing. We're doomed.

Without getting into the messy details, climate change is already affecting us, creating more extreme weather like droughts and floods, and extincting species by the thousands.

Large, dangerous effects are guaranteed at this point even if we stopped burning all fossil fuels right now. At this point, barring some incredibly dangerous sci-fi geoengineering breakthrough (and we're unlikely to get one), we can't stop global temperatures from rising by 4 degrees celsius. Yes--on average, everywhere will get about 8 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. Guaranteed.

If we don't do something major to decrease emissions very soon, we'll be guaranteed 12 degrees Fahrenheit increases. If we don't do something very big within the next 20 years, we may well be guaranteed 20 degrees or more Fahrenheit increases.

Think about what that means. That is the end of the world as we know it, and the death of nearly everything in it. Sure, mass catastrophic extinction events have happened before. But this time we'll be responsible for it, and while most species on earth with die, new ones will eventually survive and evolve over the next few million years. But our civilization almost certainly will not.

A slow-motion and irreversible collapse of a massive cluster of glaciers in Antarctica has begun, and could cause sea levels to rise across the planet by another 4 feet within 200 years, scientists concluded in two studies released Monday.

Researchers had previously estimated that the cluster in the Amundsen Sea region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would last for thousands of years despite global climate change. But the new studies found that the loss is underway now as warming ocean water melts away the base of the ice shelf, and is occurring far more rapidly than scientists expected.

The warming water is tied to several environmental phenomena, including a warming of the planet driven by emissions from human activity and depleted ozone that has changed wind patterns in the area, the studies found.

"There is no red button to stop this," said Eric Rignot, a UC Irvine professor of Earth system science and the lead author of one of the studies, conducted with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and scheduled for publication in a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The six glaciers have passed "the point of no return," Rignot said, which means that total collapse — the melted retreat of the glaciers — cannot be prevented. "The only question is how fast it's going to go."

Antarctica, surrounding the South Pole, is the largest mass of ice on the planet, containing an estimated 80% of the world's fresh water. Its scale is difficult to fathom. One environmental foundation said that if you loaded the ice onto cargo ships and started counting the vessels, one per second, it would take 860 years before you were finished counting.

The loss of even a portion of that ice would have consequences across the globe. Scientists have surmised its possibility for decades, and have braced for confirmation, which in effect arrived Monday.

The only hope for saving ourselves would be dramatic proactive action. The problem, of course, is that both democracies and free markets are notoriously reactive. That's good in the sense that it achieves a level of stability.

But in the case of climate change, reactive stability is a guarantee of death and civilization collapse.

But what does that matter when the asset values of our wealthy elites are at stake?